David Pearson

For the more than 300 million people who suffer migraines, the excruciating, pulsating pain that characterizes these debilitating headaches needs no description. For those who do not, the closest analogous experience might be severe altitude sickness: nausea, acute sensitivity to light, and searing, bed-confining headache. “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing,” wrote Joan Didion in the 1979 essay “In Bed” from her collection The White Album.

@ Scientific American
(via Hillbilly, Please)

As I’ve said, I did not always think of my life as a prison in which all actions are determined according to a random pattern thrown down by an unkown and insensate authority. Indeed, when I was young I saw myself as a masterbuilder who would one day assemble a marvellous edifice around myself, a kind of grand pavilion, airy and light, which would contain me utterly and yet wherein I would be free. Look, they would say, distinguishing this eminence from afar, look how sound it is, how solid: it’s him all right, yes, no doubt about it, the man himself. Meantime, however, unhoused, I felt at once exposed and invisible. how shall I describe it, this sense of myself as something without weight, without moorings, a floating phantom? Other people seemed to have a density, a thereness, which I lacked. Among them, these big, carefree creatures, I was like a child among adults. I watched them, wide-eyed, wondering at their calm assurance in the face of a baffling and preposterous world.

~ John Banville

Candace backed out of her driveway and hit a high school boy with the car. She didn’t realize, at first, that this was what had happened. It was raining out, a cold, gray, dreary day, and she felt only a soft thump, as though the tire had grazed a trash bag. Too late, she pressed down on the brake.

For a second, she thought that her mother had mistakenly put the garbage out on Thursday instead of Friday, and then she remembered that her mother had died almost two months earlier. That was when she saw the boy with the backpack looming on the other side of the glass.

~ Leah Browning @ Pequin

And while visiting Pequin, don’t forget to order a copy of See You Next Tuesday: The Second Coming.

• “Dad, you so have no bars.”
• “Google duh.”
• “Don’t friend me, I’ll friend you.”
• “Tell it to Twitter.”
• “That joke’s so old it’s on paper.”